2021 was a year of resilience: we continued to live through the pandemic, but we were able to be very successful, despite all the challenges posed by long-lasting remote/hybrid work. We published our research in several top conferences and journals, we acquired new research funding, we attended online scientific events, one of our colleagues obtained her PhD, and a new member joined the group.

Staff Updates

We were sad to see our colleague Romana Pernisch leave DDIS, but it was for a very good reason: Romana Pernisch successfully defended her PhD thesis “Mind the Change, Bridge the Gap Investigating the Impact of Ontology Evolution on Materialisations and Embeddings” supervised by Prof. Bernstein. Romana is currently a postdoc at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. We wish her all the best!

We are very happy that Kathrin Wardatzky decided to join us in 2021 to pursue a PhD on explainable AI.

Research

Our research got published in a variety of venues resulting in a total of 20 publications:

• Suzanne Tolmeijer, Lucien Heitz and Prof. Bernstein, together with external colleagues, published the Dagstuhl Manifesto “Diversity in News Recommendations“.
• Suzanne Tolmeijer, Prof. Bernstein, and external colleagues published the conference paper “Second Chance for a First Impression? Trust Development in Intelligent System Interaction” at User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP).
• Suzanne Tolmeijer, Prof. Bernstein, and external colleagues published the extended abstract “Female by Default?–Exploring the Effect of Voice Assistant Gender and Pitch on Trait and Trust Attribution” at Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).
• Matthias Baumgartner, Daniele Dell’Aglio and Prof. Bernstein published the workshop paper “Entity Prediction in Knowledge Graphs with Joint Embeddings” at the Workshop Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs).
• External collaborators and Rosni Vasu published the workshop paper “Automatic Medical Text Simplification: Challenges of Data Quality and Curation” at the Human Partnership with Medical Artificial Intelligence Workshop within the AAAI Fall Symposium.
• External collaborators and Cristina Sarasua published the journal article “The Impact of Task Abandonment in Crowdsourcing” at IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
• Martin Sterchi, Cristina Sarasua, Prof. Bernstein and other external colleagues published the journal article “Outbreak Detection for Temporal Contact Data” at the Applied Network Science Journal.
• Narges Ashena, Daniele Daniele Dell’Aglio, and Prof. Bernstein published the conference paper “Understanding ε for Differential Privacy in Differencing Attack Scenarios” at EAI-SecureComm 2021.
• Narges Ashena, Matthias Baumgartner, Lucien Heitz, Romana Pernisch, Florian Ruosch, Luca Rossetto, and Prof. Bernstein published the benchmark paper “VideoGraph – Towards Using Knowledge Graphs for Interactive Video Retrieval” at the Video Browser Showdown.
• Matthias Baumgartner, Lucien Heitz, Luca Rossetto, Ruijie Wang, Prof. Bernstein, and external collaborators published the workshop paper “Exploring Graph-querying approaches in LifeGraph” at the Lifelog Search Challenge. At the same venue, Luca Rossetto published other two workshop papers with external collaborators: “Exploring Intuitive Lifelog Retrieval and Interaction Modes in Virtual Reality with vitrivr-VR” and “Interactive Multimodal Lifelog Retrieval with vitrivr at LSC 2021“.
• Luca Rossetto and external collaborators published the journal article “On the User-centric Comparative Remote Evaluation of Interactive Video Search Systems” at IEEE Multimedia. 
• Luca Rossetto, Prof. Bernstein and external collaborators also published the demo paper “A system for interactive multimedia retrieval evaluations” and the conference paper “Considering Human Perception and Memory in Interactive Multimedia Retrieval Evaluations” at the International Conference on Multimedia Modelling, and a technical report on Arxiv “Insights on the V3C2 Dataset“.
• Moreover, some external collaborators and Luca Rossetto published the (i) benchmark paper “Competitive interactive video retrieval in virtual reality with vitrivr-VR” at the Video Browser Showdown, (ii) the journal article “Is the Reign of Interactive Search Eternal? – Findings from the Video Browser Showdown 2020” at ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, (iii) the conference paper “Gesture of Interest: Gesture Search for Multi-Person, Multi-Perspective TV Footage» at International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing, and (iv) the conference paper “Introduction to the Fourth Annual Lifelog Search Challenge, LSC’21” at the International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval.

Grants

2021 was extremely successful in terms of funding acquisition:

• Luca Rossetto received an SNSF Ambizione grant for the MediaGraph project.
• Prof. Bernstein and collaborators received an SNSF Sinergia grant for the project Large-Scale Political Participation: Issue Identification, Deliberation, and Co-creation —a collaboration with Cristina Sarasua, UZH Prof. Marco Steenbergen and UZH Prof. Felix Uhlmann, as well as Prof. Gianluca Demartini from the University of Queensland (UQ).
• Lucien Heitz and Prof. Bernstein received a BAKOM grant for a second round of the news experiment.
• Rosni Vasu and her collaborators from Stanford and Cornell University received a Toloka research grant for crowdsourcing experiments.

Events

Networking and disseminating our work at scientific events is one of the most exciting activities for us, scientists. While in 2021 we continued to attend events mostly online due to the COVID-19 situation, we had the chance to participate in very interesting workshops and conferences:

Suzanne Tolmeijer, Lucien Heitz and Prof. Bernstein participated in the workshop “AI, Jounalism & Democracy: Exploring the Normative Dimension” and the conference “Future of Journalism“, presenting their work on news recommendations. Lucien Heitz also participated in the “OSCE AI & FoE Workshops on Media Pluralism“. Luca Rossetto co-organized the “2nd International Workshop on Video Retrieval Methods and Their Limits” and the “Lifelog Search Challenge“. Matthias Baumgartner, Lucien Heitz, Luca Rossetto, Ruijie Wang and Prof. Bernstein also contributed with a system to the “Lifelog Search Challenge“. Narges Ashena, Matthias Baumgartner, Lucien Heitz, Romana Pernisch, Florian Ruosch, Luca Rossetto, and Prof. Bernstein contributed a benchmark to the “Video Browser Showdown“. Suzanne Tolmeijer participated in CHI 2021 and UMAP 2021 presenting her research, and she had the honour of joining the Heidelberg Laureate Forum where she had the opportunity to interact with recipients of the Turing Award.

Cristina Sarasua, Kathrin Wardatzky, and Rosni Vasu participated in CSCW 2021, Ruijie Wang participated in ISWC 2021, and Rosni Vasu also participated in the AAAI Fall Symposium 2021, and the HCOMP Graduate Consortium 2021. Narges Ashena presented her research at EAI SecureComm 2021.

Student Theses and Projects

We supervised three master projects, four bachelor theses, and 11 master theses.

In the area of news recommender systems: Valérie Nyffeler, Julian Croci, Madhav Sachdeva, Lukas Yu successfully completed their master project “Informfully Full Stack News App Extension” and Emanuel Graf, Vladimir Donkov completed their master project “Multimedia Extensions for Informfully” both supervised by Lucien Heitz. Nick Kipfer completed the bachelor thesis “Automatic Selection of Illustrative Pictures for News Articles” co-supervised by Lucien Heitz and Luca Rossetto. Marco Heiniger completed the bachelor thesis “Recommender System for Portfolio Management” supervised by Lucien Heitz. Lukas Yu and Lukas Grässle are working on their master theses “Style Transfer Algorithm for Online News” and “Recommender Systems” supervised by Lucien Heitz and plan to finish them in 2022.

In the area of multimedia understanding: Patrick Düggelin completed the master thesis “Voice isolation, speech transcription and speaker re-identification in video”, Alexander Theus completed the bachelor thesis “Scene Text Extraction for Retrieval of Visual Multimedia”, Amos Neculau completed the master thesis “Multi-Domain Media Segmentation”” Lawand Muhamad completed the master thesis “Approximate Boolean Retrieval”, Simon Widmer completed the master thesis “Large-scale Active Learning for Concept Detection in Video” —all supervised by Luca Rossetto. A paper based on the thesis by Alexander Theus has been recently accepted at MMM’22. Lutharsanen Kunam is planning to finish the master thesis “High Level Semantic Video Understanding” with Luca Rossetto in 2022.

In the context of the CrowdAlytics project: Joel Watter completed his bachelor thesis “The Argument Annotator Pipeline – Generate Visually Annotated Documents” supervised by Florian Ruosch. Ning Xie and Rinor Sefa are working on the “CrowdAlytics Annotation Framework” as a master project supervised by Cristina Sarasua, Florian Ruosch, Rosni Vasu, and Dhivyabharathi Ramasamy.

Moreover, Terézia Bucková completed her master thesis “Supervised and Unsupervised Alignment of Knowledge Graphs with pre-trained embeddings” supervised by Matthias Baumgartner and Daniele Dell’Aglio, and Badrie L. Persaud completed the master thesis “Human Perception of Privacy: Visualizing Epsilon for Differential Privacy” supervised by Narges Ashena. Vasiliki Arpatzoglou is working on the master thesis “Autonomous Car Acceptance” supervised by Suzanne Tolmeijer and Luca Rossetto, and Fan Feng is currently working on the master thesis “Natural Language Question Answering via Knowledge Graph Reasoning” supervised by Ruijie Wang.

Announcements

We have several open positions. If you are interested in pursuing a PhD and working with us, please have a look at the current job ads: https://www.ifi.uzh.ch/en/ddis/jobs.html

We look forward to the new colleagues, projects, experiments, and papers to come!